Jeff Sparrow - Provocations: New and Selected Writing

JEFF SPARROW is a writer, editor, broadcaster and Walkley awardwinning journalist.

He is a columnist for Guardian Australia, a former Breakfaster at radio station 3RRR, and a past editor of Overland literary journal. He is the author of Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating; Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre; Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right; No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson; Money Shot: A Journey into Porn and Censorship; Killing: Misadventures in Violence and Communism: A Love Story; the co-author, with Jill Sparrow, of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within; and the co-editor, with Anthony Loewenstein, of Left Turn: Essays for the New Left.

He is a lecturer at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne.

Jeff Sparrows writing makes me think, laugh and shake my fist at the sky with rage. He explains and critiques and illuminates our messed-up world with moral clarity and humour, allowing even a dum-dum like me to get my head around what the hell capitalism is doing to us all, and why it must be stopped.

Tom Ballard

Jeff s writing is not always comfortable, but its absolutely necessary, peering into the cracks too many of us pass by, and revealing them for the chasms they are. But what sets him apart is the unflinching hope he offers at the same time. Jeff shows us the world, our world, can be so much better if only we were more willing to face it as it is now and fight for what it could be. Drench yourself in his words and find your cause.

Amy Remeikis

Jeff Sparrow has a profoundly thought-provoking way of presenting the truth.

Thomas Mayor

Reading Jeff Sparrow is always like having a conversation with the smartest person in the room. Hes essential.

Chloe Hooper

Jeff Sparrow is a critical voice for justice in an increasingly sparse field. As mainstream journalism teeters between commercial clickbait and dreary stenography, take a moment to celebrate the determined independence that he brings to his work. This is a timely retrospective, balancing a sharp eye for domestic political dynamics with an internationalist worldview; fresh, fierce and uncompromising.

Scott Ludlam

Sparrow is the most effective and consistent communicator of left-wing thought to a mainstream Australian audience of the past twenty years.

Sydney Review of Books

Sparrow is one of Australias leading public intellectuals.

SALIFE

Hes one of Australias most crucial political thinkers.

Saturday Paper

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

https://unsw.press/

Jeff Sparrow 2022

First published 2022

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Internal design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design and illustrations Sam Wallman

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

T his is a little bit of my life; I will give it to you.

So said the bushranger Ned Kelly as he handed over the document now known as the Jerilderie Letter to men hed bailed up in a New South Wales country town.

Every writer understands what Kelly meant.

This book compiles decades of my work for newspapers, magazines and online outlets, pieces that analyse, in Neds words, the occurrences of the present, past and future.

Its a large bit of my life.

In the digital age, opinionating demands more justification than bushranging ever did, given the hot takes, concern trolling and clickbaiting clogging up the internet. Amid the churn of social media outrage, we instinctively sympathise with the advice the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius gave himself in his Meditations.

You dont have to turn this into something, he says in Book Six, almost as if he were peering dubiously at his Twitter feed. It doesnt have to upset you.

Most op-ed writers feel a sneaking admiration for the column published by the American journalist Bob Considine in 1973.

It simply read: I have nothing to say today.

Yet the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius (Things cant shape our decisions by themselves) distilled a particular social logic and not necessarily an admirable one. He could counsel detachment because he believed in predestination, confident that the universe itself mandated his rule over a vast, cruel empire. The slaves in the imperial palace might not have shared Marcuss faith that everything could be left to happily work itself out.

In any case, the Romans inhabited a very different world to the one weve inherited. The cascading disasters of the 21st century inevitably inhibit those who would float serenely above political contentions. You might not care about climate change but climate change certainly cares about you, as each passing season demonstrates.

George Orwell once said that, after his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, he wrote as a deliberate intervention, a literary blow directed against Stalinism, fascism and the other evils encapsulated in that conflict. It seems to me nonsense, he said, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.

According to the best available science, the next few years will determine the fate of the entire planet, with the decisions made (or not made) permanently affecting human, animal and plant life on the one inhabitable world we know. With the fire spreading, how can anyone be indifferent to its flames?

In the same article, Orwell explained that he saw his writing as a personal contribution to socialism.

For more than thirty years, Ive also been a socialist, sharing HG Wellss opposition to an order in which a small minority [] dance on the faces of everyone else. In some nations, socialism remains an unexceptional feature of the political landscape. Not, however, in Australia. As a political writer, Ive usually found myself tremendously isolated, one of only a handful of socialists contributing to the mainstream media with any regularity. Thats partly because the deep structures of the media facilitate the status quo.

If youre repeating an argument that everyone already accepts, you can do so in a few lines or a snappy soundbite. The more you walk well-trodden paths, the faster you can advance. If, however, you oppose the consensus, you cant take anything for granted. Youre forced to argue each point almost from first principles, like a mountaineer hacking steps into a summit.